I bet you could use these to assess terrorist threat levels! There would be a different color depending on how likely it is to be attacked by a terrorist!!
You've made that reply with absolutely no knowledge about what you're talking about.
Xbox games are NOT written with DirectX. They're written with the XDK, which is (of course) completely optimized for the very specific Microsoft hardware. So your entire post is predicated upon the false assumption that XBox developers use DirectX. Do you often make arguments with completely incorrect information?
The point of my post was not that the Xbox is a PC and Xbox software is written using DirectX. The point of my post was that the XBox is very much like a PC and parts of the XDK are very much like DirectX. Knowledge that programmers have about getting great performance out of PCs is often useful knowledge when it comes to the Xbox. This is not the case with the PS2.
The reason there won't be anyone playing Xbox games online when the Xbox2 comes out isn't that they probably aren't willing to pay $15/month for Xbox Live. There are plenty of ways to play Xbox games online perfectly free, having nothing to do with Live, and there are whole communities who do so.
The reason is that there are so relatively few people who would wait to buy an Xbox until the Xbox2 comes out that you would very rarely find anyone online. Without a very large base of players, online gaming just doesn't work.
the graphics on the xbox seem to be on launch date level, the Playstation 2 always seem to reach into the guts of the machine and pick up some more power.
That might have to do with the fact that programming well for the PS2 is such a complex and difficult task. The architecture is completely custom and proprietary, and you need all kinds of tricks and workarounds to "reach into the guts of the machine", as you put it.
Programming for the XBox, on the other hand, is an easy task for anyone who's used to programming PC games with DirectX (and that's a lot of people). So it's not that XBox games haven't gotten any better since launch date.. it's that they can't, because from the start they've been able to use the machine to its full potential. No horrendous learning curve.
It should also be noted that, IMHO, the XBox's launch-date graphics are far and above the PS2's graphics, even when PS2 devs "reach into the guts of the machine".
Good games have been around $50 for every console since my good old Sega Master System (at least). Get used to it, because it's not going to change any time soon.
Don't forget that in order to get linux on there you need to install a modchip, which typically runs you about $50.
Sure, you could get someone else with a modchip to flash your TSOP, meaning you wouldn't need a modchip, but that's risky. If anything goes wrong, you have a big black paperweight.
Why the hell would you want XBox developers to go out of business just because you don't happen to like the XBox? You think nothing out there should exist if it's not something that you enjoy?
Do you realize that the more competition there is out there, the better the games will be for your choice of console?
I think it would be very sad if it were abused in such a way that enabled widespread piracy of PS2 games
Umm... where have you been the past few years? PS2 games are almost as pirated as Xbox games are, perhaps more.
First of all, keep in mind that you don't have to get rid of your xbox live account if you mod your xbox. The only restriction is that your modchip cannot be enabled at the time you log into Live. With most modchips, you have to pull a jumper or flick an external switch to disable the modchip, but with the latest BIOSes it's done automatically.
Even given that you buy your games and don't want to run linux on your xbox, I would personally recommend modding it. It's really not very expensive (about the price of one game, or less), and there are many more advantages to a modded xbox than pirated games and linux. For instance, the ability to back up your games to your harddrive is invaluable, especially with the fragility of DVDs (you may need a bigger harddrive for this, depending on how many you want to back up). This will not only protect your games, it will speed up your load times by a lot. You can also back up your DVD movies if you want, though those would often be quite big. Also, it gives you the ability to play VCDs, SVCDs, just about any audio/video media format. You can install emulators for virtually every game platform ever released, and there are free ROMs or you can buy them very cheaply.
You're wrong if you think that only "hackers" (people who like to tinker with their hardware and software.. linux uses... etc) and people interested in technology on more than a superficial level mod their consoles. The vast majority of people who mod their consoles are kiddies who don't want to pay for games.
Virtually anyone can do it. opening the case and poking around inside requires simply unscrewing a few screws, setting the solderless modchip in place, screwing it in, and putting the top back on your xbox.
But, I think there is a huge difference between killing animals in a humane way in order to eat them and torturing animals for fun.
Well for starters, I'll agree that killing something via slow torture is certainly more wrong than killing something quickly and "humanely". But for the sake of argument (since we're arguing about the <i>reason</i> behind the killing, not the difference between torturing and killing quickly), let's replace your "torturing animals for fun" with "killing animals quickly and painlessly for fun".
I don't mean to argue that fun is just as legitimate a reason for killing something as survival. But the fact is that virtually no one (at least in the United States and other very developed countries) needs to kill an animal to survive, or even to stay healthy. So what exactly is the difference betwen killing an animal for fun and killing an animal for the taste? Both involve killing an animal not for survivial, but for emotional gratification.
Let me remind you that I don't have a particular stance on the matter.. not one that's strong enough for me to talk about atleast. But, as I said before, I think people are being hypocritical when they talk about animal rights when they're busy eating meat every day.
I agree with you on the CDs comment. They're crap. The same with DVDs. I actually held out for a number of years on buying a DVD player and starting a DVD collection in the hopes that some new technology would come out and trump it.
I'm not even talking about some crazy new kind of storage. All I want is a nice, very thin, plastic jacket that goes around the DVD to protect it. Does anyone remember floppy disks? That's what I'm thinking about, except not floppy. It wouldn't considerably add to the size of the DVD; and it would enable you to toss them around as you see fit, instead of treating them like faberge eggs.
Why will it never happen? Because it's not cost effective.
It is appropriate to kill a cow to eat it. It is not appropriate to torture a cow for sadistic fun.
I don't buy that. Why is it appropriate to kill a cow to eat it? Unless you're starving and have nothing else to eat, then you have a very real choice. Lots of vegetarians go entire lives without eating meat. So a person killing a cow to enjoy the flavor is to me the exact sam ething as a person hitting a cow with a baseball bat for fun.
Don't get me wrong. Eat all the cows (or people for that matter) you want, I could care less. I just think people who straddle the fence by eating all the meat they can stuff their faces with, and yet they complain about animal cruelty, are hypocrites.
Guess what? It's cruel to kill an animal to eat it. Is it sometimes a necessity? Yes, especially in the past. Is it a necessity in the United States or other wealthy societies? very rarely.
Well, given your Physicistnicityness... and my ignorance of the matter... I bow to your superior intellect. And I, for one, welcome... er... nevermind.
If not, then how do you know that one theory or the other can't be proven, or atleast supported, by mathematics? Perhaps through investigating these, scientists could find that point-like black holes are in fact mathematically impossible.
Science is to the point where we think about lots of things that can't be observed. You're right that if something can't be observed, then it doesn't directly matter to us. But thinking about such things can benefit us by leading us to more accurate models of the universe, and to conclusions which can be observed and useful.
Occam's Razor doesn't say anything about things being unknowable. Obviously if things are unknowable, it doesn't make sense (or atleast it isn't useful) to talk about them; that's not what Occam's Razor refers to.
Occam's Razor says simply that "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything". So Occam's Razor would advise you against believing that our universe is one of many or just a tiny part of something else if that fact isn't required to explain something. It doesn't prevent you from thinking about that fact if there is some evidence which might lead to that fact, though.
Like you said, WANPs... so maybe the theory requires, or predicts, that the universe is inside one of these "balls of durable matter".
I've never really had problems imagining that time has no beginning and no end. I've just removed the idea from my head that something that exists necessarily must have at one time not existed and will one day not exist.
My use of time in that last sentence illustrates the problem I've always had with imagining that time does have a beginning and/or an end. When you say something has a beginning, you are speaking of something's existance with respect to time. Without the concept of time, there is no temporal beginning or end, just by definition! If you were going to say that what we know as time has a beginning or an end, I'd ask you in what dimension time begins or ends. You'd have to propose a second temporal dimension for your words to make any sense.
So, in short, I disagree with you. It is more difficult (for me atleast) to imagine time beginning or ending than it is to imagine time not beginning or ending.
What I think he's saying is that you must be new here, else you'd realize that your fancy schmancy Slashdot Strawman already has a name, or at least a standard reply.
If you are already planning on attending scholarship, and you don't have financial need, why exactly do you need one? Don't you think the money should go to those students who are financially in need?
I'm not saying I would turn down a scholarship given to me, even if I didn't necessarily financially need one, but is it really worth an Ask Slashdot?
Dead right - glad someone else gets annoyed by assholes who can't speak their own language.
...
And more to the point, which asshole came up with that corruption of the word in the first place, bcos they deserve to be killed with a sharpened dictionary!
Then you're probably also annoyed by people who can't write their own language. So I'm sure you were just joking when you stuck a question within a statement (which asshole came up with that corruption of the word in the first place) without capitalizing the first letter of the first word of the question -- not to mention the fact that even with the capitalization, you can't mix a question and a statement like that in one sentence. I'm sure you were also joking when you put a question mark at the end of a statement that isn't a question (So I suppose "irregardless" would be "with regard to"?). Is that really a question? How should we know if you suppose that?
And if you weren't joking, I'm sure it won't affect you, because you probably live criticizing everyone else's mistakes but discount anyone who points out yours.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet you could use these to assess terrorist threat levels! There would be a different color depending on how likely it is to be attacked by a terrorist!!
Oh wait...
Xbox games are NOT written with DirectX. They're written with the XDK, which is (of course) completely optimized for the very specific Microsoft hardware. So your entire post is predicated upon the false assumption that XBox developers use DirectX. Do you often make arguments with completely incorrect information?
The point of my post was not that the Xbox is a PC and Xbox software is written using DirectX. The point of my post was that the XBox is very much like a PC and parts of the XDK are very much like DirectX. Knowledge that programmers have about getting great performance out of PCs is often useful knowledge when it comes to the Xbox. This is not the case with the PS2.
The reason there won't be anyone playing Xbox games online when the Xbox2 comes out isn't that they probably aren't willing to pay $15/month for Xbox Live. There are plenty of ways to play Xbox games online perfectly free, having nothing to do with Live, and there are whole communities who do so.
The reason is that there are so relatively few people who would wait to buy an Xbox until the Xbox2 comes out that you would very rarely find anyone online. Without a very large base of players, online gaming just doesn't work.
That might have to do with the fact that programming well for the PS2 is such a complex and difficult task. The architecture is completely custom and proprietary, and you need all kinds of tricks and workarounds to "reach into the guts of the machine", as you put it.
Programming for the XBox, on the other hand, is an easy task for anyone who's used to programming PC games with DirectX (and that's a lot of people). So it's not that XBox games haven't gotten any better since launch date.. it's that they can't, because from the start they've been able to use the machine to its full potential. No horrendous learning curve.
It should also be noted that, IMHO, the XBox's launch-date graphics are far and above the PS2's graphics, even when PS2 devs "reach into the guts of the machine".
Good points, but they don't apply if you're an online gamer. By the time the Xbox2 comes out, hardly anyone will be playing Xbox games online anymore.
Good games have been around $50 for every console since my good old Sega Master System (at least). Get used to it, because it's not going to change any time soon.
Don't forget that in order to get linux on there you need to install a modchip, which typically runs you about $50.
Sure, you could get someone else with a modchip to flash your TSOP, meaning you wouldn't need a modchip, but that's risky. If anything goes wrong, you have a big black paperweight.
Do you realize that the more competition there is out there, the better the games will be for your choice of console?
I think it would be very sad if it were abused in such a way that enabled widespread piracy of PS2 games
Umm... where have you been the past few years? PS2 games are almost as pirated as Xbox games are, perhaps more.
God I wish I had mod points. This was one of the funniest posts I've ever read.
Even given that you buy your games and don't want to run linux on your xbox, I would personally recommend modding it. It's really not very expensive (about the price of one game, or less), and there are many more advantages to a modded xbox than pirated games and linux. For instance, the ability to back up your games to your harddrive is invaluable, especially with the fragility of DVDs (you may need a bigger harddrive for this, depending on how many you want to back up). This will not only protect your games, it will speed up your load times by a lot. You can also back up your DVD movies if you want, though those would often be quite big. Also, it gives you the ability to play VCDs, SVCDs, just about any audio/video media format. You can install emulators for virtually every game platform ever released, and there are free ROMs or you can buy them very cheaply.
The sky's the limit!
Virtually anyone can do it. opening the case and poking around inside requires simply unscrewing a few screws, setting the solderless modchip in place, screwing it in, and putting the top back on your xbox.
But, I think there is a huge difference between killing animals in a humane way in order to eat them and torturing animals for fun.
Well for starters, I'll agree that killing something via slow torture is certainly more wrong than killing something quickly and "humanely". But for the sake of argument (since we're arguing about the <i>reason</i> behind the killing, not the difference between torturing and killing quickly), let's replace your "torturing animals for fun" with "killing animals quickly and painlessly for fun".
I don't mean to argue that fun is just as legitimate a reason for killing something as survival. But the fact is that virtually no one (at least in the United States and other very developed countries) needs to kill an animal to survive, or even to stay healthy. So what exactly is the difference betwen killing an animal for fun and killing an animal for the taste? Both involve killing an animal not for survivial, but for emotional gratification.
Let me remind you that I don't have a particular stance on the matter.. not one that's strong enough for me to talk about atleast. But, as I said before, I think people are being hypocritical when they talk about animal rights when they're busy eating meat every day.
I agree with you on the CDs comment. They're crap. The same with DVDs. I actually held out for a number of years on buying a DVD player and starting a DVD collection in the hopes that some new technology would come out and trump it.
I'm not even talking about some crazy new kind of storage. All I want is a nice, very thin, plastic jacket that goes around the DVD to protect it. Does anyone remember floppy disks? That's what I'm thinking about, except not floppy. It wouldn't considerably add to the size of the DVD; and it would enable you to toss them around as you see fit, instead of treating them like faberge eggs.
Why will it never happen? Because it's not cost effective.
I think we should be focusing our efforts on advancements in solid-state storage devices.
The basic technology for HDDs is very old, they're very fragile, they eat a lot (relatively) of power.
I don't buy that. Why is it appropriate to kill a cow to eat it? Unless you're starving and have nothing else to eat, then you have a very real choice. Lots of vegetarians go entire lives without eating meat. So a person killing a cow to enjoy the flavor is to me the exact sam ething as a person hitting a cow with a baseball bat for fun.
Don't get me wrong. Eat all the cows (or people for that matter) you want, I could care less. I just think people who straddle the fence by eating all the meat they can stuff their faces with, and yet they complain about animal cruelty, are hypocrites.
Guess what? It's cruel to kill an animal to eat it. Is it sometimes a necessity? Yes, especially in the past. Is it a necessity in the United States or other wealthy societies? very rarely.
Well, given your Physicistnicityness... and my ignorance of the matter... I bow to your superior intellect. And I, for one, welcome... er... nevermind.
You have a lot of balls for calling someone up on reposting from another source, when you did exactly the same thing not half-an-hour ago.
& th reshold=0&commentsort=0&tid=186&tid=214&mode=threa d&pid=7903959#7904430
http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=91901
In my opinion, this kind of thing deserves banishment from slashdot.. and maybe bamboo spikes shoved under the nails.
IANAP... are you?
If not, then how do you know that one theory or the other can't be proven, or atleast supported, by mathematics? Perhaps through investigating these, scientists could find that point-like black holes are in fact mathematically impossible.
Science is to the point where we think about lots of things that can't be observed. You're right that if something can't be observed, then it doesn't directly matter to us. But thinking about such things can benefit us by leading us to more accurate models of the universe, and to conclusions which can be observed and useful.
Occam's Razor doesn't say anything about things being unknowable. Obviously if things are unknowable, it doesn't make sense (or atleast it isn't useful) to talk about them; that's not what Occam's Razor refers to.
Occam's Razor says simply that "one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything". So Occam's Razor would advise you against believing that our universe is one of many or just a tiny part of something else if that fact isn't required to explain something. It doesn't prevent you from thinking about that fact if there is some evidence which might lead to that fact, though.
Like you said, WANPs... so maybe the theory requires, or predicts, that the universe is inside one of these "balls of durable matter".
My use of time in that last sentence illustrates the problem I've always had with imagining that time does have a beginning and/or an end. When you say something has a beginning, you are speaking of something's existance with respect to time. Without the concept of time, there is no temporal beginning or end, just by definition! If you were going to say that what we know as time has a beginning or an end, I'd ask you in what dimension time begins or ends. You'd have to propose a second temporal dimension for your words to make any sense.
So, in short, I disagree with you. It is more difficult (for me atleast) to imagine time beginning or ending than it is to imagine time not beginning or ending.
RTFA.
If you are already planning on attending scholarship, and you don't have financial need, why exactly do you need one? Don't you think the money should go to those students who are financially in need? I'm not saying I would turn down a scholarship given to me, even if I didn't necessarily financially need one, but is it really worth an Ask Slashdot?
You actually used the tunneling software, and you don't even know how it works? Pay more attention man.
They don't allow you to play "Xbox Live games", "as if they were on Live but not on Live."
They're tunneling the system link feature, creating a virtual network. It has nothing to do with Live.
Maybe you need this explained to you slowly so you'll understand this.
I.. am.. only.. correcting.. him.. because.. I.. was... annoyed.. at.. the... fact.. that.. he.. felt.. the.. need.. to.. correct... someone.. else.. and.. insult.. them.
Does that make sense, or do you need a picture-book to understand it?
...
And more to the point, which asshole came up with that corruption of the word in the first place, bcos they deserve to be killed with a sharpened dictionary!
Then you're probably also annoyed by people who can't write their own language. So I'm sure you were just joking when you stuck a question within a statement (which asshole came up with that corruption of the word in the first place) without capitalizing the first letter of the first word of the question -- not to mention the fact that even with the capitalization, you can't mix a question and a statement like that in one sentence. I'm sure you were also joking when you put a question mark at the end of a statement that isn't a question (So I suppose "irregardless" would be "with regard to"?). Is that really a question? How should we know if you suppose that?
And if you weren't joking, I'm sure it won't affect you, because you probably live criticizing everyone else's mistakes but discount anyone who points out yours.
Get off your high horse.